"Ai yi yi."An assistant brings in some new Green Day T-shirts – they're her favorite band.Serena reanimates and does a bunny hop around the dining room. "Patrick Mouratoglou, her newish French coach and possibly her boyfriend, emerges from a backroom.And she would not have given a flying fuck what you thought.This is a woman who one minute is reading inspirational notes during changeovers and then, in the 2009 U. Open semifinals, threatening to personally make a line judge eat a tennis ball.(Evert now says Serena is the best of all time.) Hell, even dating Brett Ratner couldn't stop her. Serena and Venus Williams share a house in a gated community in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, where the rest of the residents have been enjoying the early-bird specials for years. On a misty March morning, Serena answers the door in sweats and a T-shirt, her long hair flowing in about seven directions."Come on in," she says, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.

She's never been more dominant than now, at the age of 31, which is about 179 in tennis years.

The caravan heads to a court about a half-mile from the house and begins loading out the gear.

It's two days before the start of the Sony Open in Miami, one of the circuit's premier nonmajors and the first significant test for Serena since she was upset in the quarterfinals at the Australian Open after spraining an ankle that had ballooned to three times its normal size.

Serena has been giving tennis the two-finger salute for more than half her life. "Lots of my friends have been telling me lately that I'm spoiled," Serena says with a baffled look on her face. I'm not spoiled.'"I almost spit Coke through my nose. If she'd pulled a Jamesian I'm-taking-my-talents-to-South Beach event, she would have put it on pay-per-view and hawked her Home Shopping Network-all-under-a-hundred-bucks fashion line during the commercial breaks.

Serena's dominance has been fueled by not giving a shit what you or anyone else thinks about her methods.